What the Colors of the Clothes on Breaking Bad Tell You About the Characters and Story

Posted on August 18, 2013 at 8:00 am

I love stories like this wonderful analysis by John LaRue about the way the costume designers on “Breaking Bad” use the colors of the characters’ clothes to tell you what is going on.

There are a lot of patterns that emerge, so much so that each character has an identifying color.

After Walt’s cancer diagnosis, his colors become stronger, and eventually go black. When the cancer returns or when he’s defeated, the drab khaki returns. The closer he gets to Gus, and the stronger his ties to blue meth, the more blue shows up in his barcode.

Skyler starts out blue, but turns dark once she starts to figure out Walt’s secret. Her timeline turns deep blue, almost purple, as her flirtation with Ted grows, and then it turns green once she discovers Walt’s stash of money. The more complicit she becomes in Walt’s criminal activity, the blacker her timeline gets to the point that it’s pitch black in season 4.

Fascinating!

MVP of the Month: Brie Larson

Posted on August 17, 2013 at 3:52 pm

I had the great pleasure of speaking to Brie Larson in 2006 about her film, “Hoot,” and I thought she was terrific, both in person and in the film. Last week, I had the even greater pleasure of seeing her in three outstanding new independent films. In “The Spectacular Now,” she plays the popular high school girl who breaks up with the main character but acknowledges that he’ll “always be my favorite ex-boyfriend.” She has just one line in Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s “Don Jon,” but it shows that throughout all the other scenes where she was texting as her family argued all around her she was paying better attention to what was going on than any of them. And she stars in the heart-wrenching “Short Term 12” as a sympathetic aide in a facility for abused and neglected teenagers who is still struggling with her own history of abuse. Larson was funny, smart, and very real in the wild comedy “21 Jump Street,” and it is great to see her get a chance to explore a wider range of characters. Up ahead, “Basimati Blues” with Donald Sutherland and Tyne Daly and “Relanxious” with Olivia Wilde and Jason Sudeikis. Can’t wait.

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“Casting By” — HBO Documentary About Casting Directors

Posted on August 17, 2013 at 8:00 am

Anyone who cares about movies should see “Casting By,” a new documentary on HBO about casting directors. It is a rare opportunity to see early glimpses of some of the greatest actors live in their first roles and even never-seen before audition tapes. But more important, it is a chance to understand the influence of casting directors like the pioneering Marion Dougherty, who championed actors like Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and John Travolta and literally changed the face of movies.

In the early studio days, actors were primarily chosen for their looks, including the indefinable “screen presence.” They were under contract, and when it came time to make a movie they would often pick whoever was available from their list of in-house talent. They would train them in-house as well. “They used what people looked like physically to define the character…Can we fix the nose, can we fix the teeth? Last on the list was ‘can they act?'”

The end of the studio era coincided with a change in story-telling on film that opened the door for New York stage-trained actors who looked less like leading men and more like real people, actors who understood a new kind of acting based on “inner being, emotional truth.” The movies were ready for “great actors as opposed to the Hollywood star-making system.” That was where Dougherty came in. She began casting for live television, a trial by fire that was the perfect foundation for getting to know the actors and the business. It is touching to hear the gratitude of the actors she helped. “She can see what other people can’t see,” we learn. “Even before you see it in yourself,” adds Danny Glover.

Interview: Cuba Gooding, Jr. of “Lee Daniels’ The Butler”

Posted on August 16, 2013 at 3:58 pm

I spoke to Oscar-winner Cuba Gooding, Jr. about his role in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” as Carter, a colleague and friend of Cecil, the character played by Forest Whitaker.

My favorite scene with your character is when you had to post bail for Cecil’s son, Louis.

The whole idea behind it and reason I was so attracted to this screenplay was that it is an expose of the times all the way back from slavery to the inauguration of Barack Obama, and specifically the turmoil of the era after JFK and Martin Luther King were assassinated. There were different thoughts about how best to respond to racism. One was the view of Martin Luther King, Jr. mindset that we should be seen as accessible and approachable and lead by example, and the other more aggressive frame of mind, the “by any means necessary” views of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. What’s beautifully expressed in this movie is how it doesn’t alienate people but shows these two approaches in a way that’s accessible and open and un-opinionated. That’s what makes Lee Daniels such a brilliant director. I always say to him, “If Spike Lee did this movie, no one would see it. He would have had his opinions and his personal beliefs encroaching on it. As a gay, black filmmaker, there is so much truth in his life that Lee’s willing to expose. There will be raw and uncomfortable moments because he does not know anything but the truth. And in that scene, you have Carter, a butler who is forced to wear a certain face to those around him, dignitaries, he has to be professional to the nth degree. Louis is trying to find his way with a more aggressive stance. But he knew he could come to Carter because they had a relationship. My character is there to show that even though they had to act in a particular way, they had to be representative of something they were still human. That is a very humanistic scene, so people can identify that this is a family with very real issues.

Yes, your character had an upstairs face and a downstairs face.

I fell in love with the idea of doing this script when Lee sent it to me five or six years ago. This is a powerful, encompassing tale of what African-American men have been dealing with since the formation of this country. I’m a huge fan of boxing and I have studied the history of pugilism. When Jack Johnson was the first black heavyweight. He was dominating boxers. He was only looking to fight white boxers because they wouldn’t fight him. When they finally did get rid of him, they looked for any opportunity and finally found it. It took 40, 50 years for another black champion to come along because it was like “we’re not going to have that scenario again.” And then came Joe Louis. Was he any less talented or ferocious? No. But he knew he had to act different to be accepted. He was the polar opposite of everything Jack Johnson did. That’s what makes this movie great. You have these butlers who have to be “invisible in the room — the room should feel empty with them in it,” as it says in the script. That is their job. And then there are the locker room scenes, which are full of life! You see that these were living, breathing, powerful men. And that is why being in this film has been such a blessing.

That’s one of the reasons the first scene with Richard Nixon is so meaningful — he comes into the kitchen, the private, backstairs, backstage space.

My favorite scene!

What do you hope the teenagers and who are too young to remember the 60’s and 70’s will get from this film?

There’s such a disconnect with today’s youth in understanding the atrocities that happened on American soil. That’s how “Django Unchained” can be a huge hit because they aren’t identifying what it really meant to be a slave, to watch a man rape your wife and allow it to happen. This next generation of kids will be making decisions for us and they’re not up to date on understanding the past. It’s horrifying to me. I want people to talk in the car on the way home — about the love story or about the freedom riders or about the politics. As long as they’re talking, we know we did our job.

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Interview: David Oyelowo of “Lee Daniels’ The Butler”

Posted on August 16, 2013 at 8:00 am

David Oyelowo (“Red Tails”) plays the son of the title character in “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.” Louis is a rebellious young man who becomes deeply involved in the 1960’s and 70’s struggle for equal rights, first through sit-ins and voter registration and then with the Black Panthers. His estrangement and reconciliation with his father, a White House butler, is the heart of the film.

Your character aged over decades and you seemed very specific about the choices you made in showing that the character was getting older.

When Lee Daniels approached me about playing the role I was very clear that I really wanted the opportunity to play it all the way through. Early on, he was thinking about splitting it with a younger actor. But I had played Henry VI on stage, and he goes from age 14 to his sixties. I learned just how much you can depict through the eyes, the body movement, what’s going on emotionally. Even moreso on film than in the theater because you have the eyes, the small gestures that indicate a wealth of experience or a lack of that. I had to employ more technical aspects over the three month shoot. I would sleep for 10 hours the night before I had to play a teenager and I’d sleep four or five hours when I had to play older. I’d go to the gym to shed weight very quickly to play the younger character and I’d eat a lot of salty food and drink a lot of water that bloats me out to play the older character. All of those things help as well. But when you have a good script that goes to the heart of what a character’s going through at any time that helps with the details.

How did you and Forest Whitaker, who plays your character’s father, work together to develop that relationship?

We didn’t spend a lot of time talking through it as that was appropriate because what you’re seeing for a lot of the movie is a disconnect. The generational divide manifests because they are both products of their environment. He grew up in the South and grew up with lynching and saw his father shot before his eyes. That’s entirely different to my character’s experience, a middle-class upbringing, and my life by comparison is a lot nicer. But the inequality that we both suffered, the injustice that is intrinsic to American society is undeniable and something that we both feel a need to fight but in very different ways. We both felt a need to just trust that as we go on very separate paths, the payoff is going to be at the end of the movie, a shared appreciation of each other’s journey toward what was effectively the same goal. It was that butting of heads internally that led to the combustive elements that led to bringing about irrevocable change, that internal argument about what it is to be a man, a woman, a human being in America regardless of the color of your skin.

You are from Great Britain and much of this happened before you were born. What did you do to research the era?

You name it, “Eyes on the Prize,” many books. One of the great things about the era is that it is in living memory for lots of people who are able to be very articulate about it. The resources personally for me as an actor were infinite. Can one person really go through all those things? Yes, there are people who were at the sit-ins and rode on the bus and went into politics. My character is a composite but he represents the experience of real people.

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